[Low-Tech] Landing Craft at TL2 to TL4

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Icelander

... why would the sole historical war galley design to demonstratably attain Move 5 use significantly more than 120 rowers (170) and weigh less than a third of 300 tons (less than 80 tons fully loaded)?

If you'd prefer, you could probably use that as a guideline. As a warship, chances are good the number of rowers is more than what are actually required, in order to allow it to more readily soak up casualties. Let's say the ship might be able to lose up to 20 men and still function normally - that puts it at 150, for 50 men per system. The weight of the ship (which is what SS cares about) is appropriate for an SM+6 vessel, so for the sort of performance seen in the article some more appropriate numbers might be 15 (SM+5), 50 (SM+6), and 150 (SM+7). Unfortunately, following this progression we find the penteconter (SM+4 by weight) should need only 10 rowers for its Move 1/4, when in reality it has 50. Maintaining the same percent extras, the penteconter might be able to lose 6 men without losing performance, implying 22 men per system. That implies something like +1 SSR (rather than the above +3 SSR) per +1 SM, for a progression of 30 (SM+5), 50 (SM+6), 70 (SM+7). If we assume a decent number of the slaves on that 420+ men galley (at least, I'm assuming that's a slave galley) have ST less than 10, this progression might work decently well.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Realistically, attention needs to be paid to matching rowing power on both sides, but there is nothing inherently unrealistic or cinematic about scaling the motive power generated by each rower by his strength (or indeed, by some combination of strength and skill).

Personally, I'd be more inclined to just total up everyone's BL and divide by 20 to determine the effective number of rowers, rather than doing the above log business, but I don't know what gives more realistic values.

[Icelander]

Realistically, of course, rowers can propel a given craft at Move 2-3 fairly easily, but going faster than that requires extremely specific design goals that include as much length as you can practically attain, radical streamlining in water and as little weight as possible.

Going from Move 2 to Move 3 and from Move 3 to even higher Move scores involves non-trivial diminishing returns in terms of efficiency. Getting the maximum possible rowing speed of Move 5 or so has always been an extremely expensive proposition that requires you to sacrifice most every other consideration for your vessel.

I doubt very much that it's realistic to allow adding just +50% to your number of rowers and the expence of a single additional system to go from a fairly typical galley speed of Move 4 to the highest we have evidence of, for Move 5.

It seems to have been a ground-up redesign that sacrificed nearly everything else for speed and required almost as many rowers as it was theoretically possible to cram in there.